The Routledge Handbook of International Beat Literature

The Beat panorama addressed in this collection, albeit to be acknowledged as selective, leaves little doubt that to continue insisting only or even largely upon the usual canon of names falls greatly short of the mark. This is not to understate the enduring impact of Ginsberg or Kerouac or the augmenting taste for Burroughs. Nor is it to pretend that Beat can act as the one encompassing gloss across each geographic and literary border-the term folds into any amount of countercultural variety of voice and activism, text and comportment. But it is to recognize an Atlatic and Pacific spectrum of shared affinities that has arisen beyond Manhattan or California into terrain that extends to Canada, Mexico, Europe, Australasia and Asia. (Introduction - A. Robert Lee)